I was recently contacted by a researcher who was interested in studying “alt” events, like !!Con, and I wrote up some answers that I thought might be interesting to folks and worth preserving. Some of the questions are edited for brevity or style.

These are also only my opinions and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the other !!Con organizers.

What are your event’s biggest successes?

1. !!Con succeeded in creating a “radically inclusive” space. Folks from usually marginalized backgrounds consistently reported feeling safe and welcome at !!Con
2. Positive reviews. Occasionally people that I don’t know posted about how excited they were for !!Con, or how they wish that !!Con was coming back
3. There were many events based around the world that specifically called out !!Con as inspiration
4. We really pushed the envelope with accessibility, and I like to think that over the past 10 years we influenced other conferences to think more about accessibility as part of their conference design

What are your event’s biggest failures?

1. We were unable to keep the conference running after 10 years, due to not bringing on new, fresh organizers while the original organizers stepped into roles (manager, parent, etc) that left little time for conference organizing. After 10 years we held “one last” !!Con, and now it’s done. Funding also SEVERELY dried up this past year, to the point where we had to ask our fans to financially rescue us.
2. The first few years I tried to run A/V and livestreaming myself, and since I was inexperienced at livestreaming and we didn’t do dry runs, etc, we ended up with a lot of technical problems the first few years. Switching to outside contractors (shoutout to Confreaks) to run A/V helped a LOT with our production quality.

What is the relationship between your “alt” conference and any parent conference or institution

!!Con was a standalone conference. !!Con started with Recurse Center alum, and was hosted there for the first year, but (although we love RC) we consciously tried to not feel “cliquey” and like only RC folks were welcome, despite the fact that the communities had significant overlap.

Would you say that your event has a distinct community?

Yes – the folks who run and attend !!Con tend to care about things like accessibility and inclusion. There is a large contingent, perhaps the majority, who are queer or queer-presenting. There was a very specific vibe that we were going for that wasn’t written down, but there were several folks who gave many talks at !!Con who just “got” that vibe. If I were to vaguely gesture at it with words, it would be: creativity, technological hubris, and an unshakable desire to build things.

Talk about your event’s review process and format

!!Con was usually two days of ten-minute lightning talks (about 30 total) with two 40-minute keynotes, one each day.

We tried an experimental online week-long conference in 2021 due to covid
(https://bangbangcon.com/2021/program.html) which was … okay. The talks were great, but I think most folks were pretty screen-fatigued at that point and it burnt out the organizers somewhat. Our next online-only conference in 2022 was similarly low-energy, despite great talks. However, getting folks back together in-person (outdoors) in 2024 worked well, and I think we did end with a great one.

We also accepted non-talk talks, which were things like musicals, plays, performances, comedy routines, etc. These had to be on-topic (joy and excitement of computing) but the format did not need to be talk-with-slides. More at https://organicdonut.com/2019/01/22/expanding-the-con-aesthetic/

Finally, we had a rigorous anonymization process to ensure that we were selecting talks based on the merit of the talk and not the speaker, which you can read more about at https://organicdonut.com/2018/03/14/the-con-talk-anonymization-and-selection-process/

In 2022, we tried “oops all keynotes” where we hand-selected the speakers without telling them what we wanted them to talk about. This produced great talks, but unfortunately fell mid-covid when folks were burnt out on screentime. It also took more speaker wrangling from the organizer team (especially selecting who to reach out to). We went back to CFP + anonymization in 2024.

What do alt events mean to you?

On a personal note, as someone who is neurodivergent and sometimes struggles to deal with large crowds for extended periods of time, alt events with fewer people like !!Con bring the energy down to a manageable level. !!Con was also loudly progressive in our values, meaning that I always felt safe there, and like I wouldn’t be judged for any idiosyncratic behavior.

At a higher level, I think !!Con and other alt events are great for first time speakers, creating venues for talks about exploration outside of the mainstream, and creating more accessible (cheaper, for one) ways for folks to connect. !!Con, for example, was “pay-what-you-want”.

What did alt events give you?

Organizing !!Con, especially this last year, was a confidence booster in: organizing, event design, asking for money from lots of people, sending cold emails, and generally being assertive in a business sense.

!!Con has also given me so many connections to people who are building really interesting things. This helped, for example, when I was laid off, and mentioned it at !!Con. Several people reached out to talk about potential job opportunities.

Do you have any thoughts on the state of alt events?

1. Alt events are really funded at the whim of larger economic forces. In 2021 and 2022, we had people throwing money at us. In 2024, we got zero corporate sponsors until we sent out a “we need funding or this won’t happen” email, and even then, many of the corporations were small ones owned by !!Con fans. I think this was because, as layoffs and other belt-tightening start, this kind of outreach is often one of the first things to go.
2. Alt events were really radical 10 years ago when there weren’t as many safe spaces for non-mainstream communities to gather and talk about things. I think as folks have moved to places like discord, reddit, HN, lobsters, etc, there’s a perpetual alt event going on, releasing a lot of the pressure to hold centralized events.
3. Twitter “died” (to us) and we didn’t realize how much of our marketing was tweets. I think the loss of Twitter as an “alt” tech hub killed a lot of momentum around alt event organizing. Mastodon will likely be the replacement, but growth there is much slower due to the decentralized aspect.
4. Covid also killed events, especially ones aimed at progressive folks. People are still concerned about disease spreading at large events. We were able to avoid some of this by running our last event outdoors, but that increased our costs by a lot (brighter screen, more A/V, chair and umbrella rentals, etc). On the other hand, long online events are painful for everyone.

That’s it! Thanks 🙂

From Grand Rapids,

Erty